As I keep pondering this, it occurs to me that we should define what it means to "just do the play"... because, depending upon what we mean, we pretty much never just do the play. (By some definitions it would be impossible to *just* do the play, since taking on a playwright's work from a different perspective in a wholly different context with crew and actors who also bring their own individuality to the work is necessarily a reinterpretation outside the bounds of the author's intent, even with dramaturgy and casting and an approach designed to remain maximally within the bounds of authorial intent and expectation. And arguably there is *some* room for this sort of reinterpretation to occur and still rightly be "just doing the play," as that is the nature of plays and a playwright who expects their work to be performed must allow for the necessary idiosyncrasies of individual productions.)

But if one means that we should approach classics with a purist's attitude, serving as mouthpieces for the playwright's words and story and morals with minimal alteration or editorializing, then we pretty much never do the play. Even without altering the text at all, staging a production in a different time period brings context with it (and potentially loses other context) that the author neither intended nor imagined. Costuming -- even if it is convincing period costuming -- may similarly add unintended commentary to a production.

And since we rarely perform Shakespeare uncut, what we cut and what we keep is also commentary and deliberate manipulation of the text by the director/dramaturg/etc in order to produce specific outcomes. Even "just do the play" folks cut scripts with specific goals beyond just making it shorter. Specific lines are cut to change how the audience responds to a character. Specific scenes and characters may be cut to alter the relationships of the ones who remain. Lines spoken by one character may be given to another. All of this is not what the author intended and necessarily changes the story.

(Though, sidebar -- at least with the cuts, cutting a play might still fall under "just doing the play" if one assumes that the cut scenes/lines/etc were cut for time rather than that they didn't happen at all in this retelling. Where folks fall along these lines legit fascinates me -- I think among actors familiar with the text, more tend to lean towards "cut for time." Directors, however, nearly always favor the "didn't happen" read, though they might allow for lines to be reinserted such that they did in fact happen in these retellings. And this is admittedly one part of why I'd be inclined to continue to be bolder in my approaches to plays, since I want no question of which principle is operating in the things I do. ^^;)

So yeah, at least in our approach to unlicensed classics, we never "just do the play" -- such that, insofar as that is in fact one's aim, the approach seems to rely on flexible and arbitrary and subjective parameters. One man's rigid "just doing the play" is another man's blasphemy that undoubtedly has the playwright rolling in the grave. Like I admittedly feel no moral obligation to "just do the play" or whatever arbitrary restrictions that entails -- I'd prefer to develop a project and then make the changes that serve the project -- but I think I do follow my own version of that approach? For all of the changes we made, RM-90s Salome remained recognizable as Salome and it was very important to me that it did. Despite our changes and additions, we easily kept most of the original text, and there were changes that I pointedly *didn't* make.*** We added an intermission (I got a little flak for that, but I will *always* advocate for intermissions in community theatre for reasons of courtesy, accessibility... and profit), but otherwise the structure of the play is unchanged. If you've previously seen a performance or film version of Oscar Wilde's Salome, or if you've seen Strauss's opera, or even if you're only familiar with the story from snippets in the Bible -- despite all of the changes we made on all levels -- you'd have watched RM-90s Salome and recognized it as that story. It was an intensely 90s-ified and context-divorced retelling of the story, but it hit (it more than hit; it goddamn shoryukened) all of the major plot points. It wasn't "just" the play -- it explicitly wasn't *just* the play. But RM-90s Salome was also undeniably Oscar Wilde's play? Or at least it undeniably contained major components of the play, and hopefully it made those components accessible to audiences -- ideally even more accessible and engaging to audiences than they might have been had they not been packaged and infused with so much chewy maple 90s goodness.

But in any case (despite the below, if you're still waiting to hit those asterisks) "just the play" wasn't what I was aiming to do. 😛

***(Frex, there is a *lot* of repetition in the play. There are some who would argue that at least much of the repetition should be trimmed; certainly it would be a gift to the actors and possibly to audience members who might grow bored hearing the same lines repeated ad nauseam. And Wilde repeats and mirrors phrases and moments so frequently and so deliberately that the repetition seemed to me a necessary characteristic and inherent to the "spirit" of the core text. So we kept nearly all of it. We had no problem representing Narraboth as Buzz Lightyear and having him commit suicide by ripping out his batteries -- which instantly erupted in an explosion of fake canister-snake blood slicks -- but goddamnit no matter what's happening with the tetrarch's face at any given moment we're gonna say it's sombre again and again and again and again.)